This invention relates to small arms ammunition and more particularly to a system that will enable investigative authorities to better solve crimes involving the discharge of firearms utilized with such ammunition. When firearms are utilized in the commission of a crime, the crime scene often includes spent ammunition casings. It would thus be desirable to be able to link those crime scene casings to the person or persons committing such crime. Presently there are anti-diversion tracking systems referred to as ADTS which allow manufacturers to trace products using overt and covert technologies from point of manufacture throughout the distribution chain. For instance, scannable indicia, codes including conventional bar codes can be incorporated into labels of many products such as cosmetics, shampoos and the likes in order to be able to trace the manufacturing and purchase history of such articles for purposes of recall and policing unauthorized distribution. Accordingly, it would be desirable if the general principles of such product tracking systems could be utilized and modified to enable the tracking of ammunition cartridges such that crime scene firearms"" casings could be traced to the last authorized purchaser of the ammunition cartridge from which the casing was part of.
It is, accordingly, an objective of the present invention to modify such anti-diversion tracking systems in a unique and unobvious manner so as to achieve crime scene identification of spent ammunition casings. Such is accomplished by the present ammunition tracking system which is designed to serialize ammunition cartridges in such a fashion as to be able to trace them from manufacturer, to distributor, to the retailer and finally to the final consumer or purchaser via a network of computer terminals at the point of purchase. Such system places a number or other unique identification on an interior surface of the cartridge casing which indicia will be still visible after the cartridge is fired such that investigative personnel can visually identify such number or other indicia and utilize such to trace the ammunition to the purchaser and additionally place an optically readable code on the shell casing exterior surface such that it may be read by high speed optical scanning equipment so as to, in part, establish a manufacturing and distribution history of such cartridge. Such system would thus allow casings found at crime scenes to be traced to the person who purchased them greatly enhancing the ability of law enforcement agencies to quickly and confidently solve crimes. These and other objectives of the present invention are accomplished by a small arms ammunition cartridge including a casing having a cylindrical body having inner and outer wall surfaces and opposed top and bottom ends wherein said bottom end is closed by a bottom wall in turn having a top inner surface and a lower outer surface, an explosive charge contained in the casing, a bullet attached to the top of the casing body and means for initiating the explosive charge to fire the bullet, the improvement comprising a machine readable code on at least one of the outer wall surfaces of said casing and a unique indicia visible by the human eye on at least one of said inner surfaces of said casing, said indicia identifying a particular casing and said code including identification of said indicia.
Other objects, features and advantages of the invention shall become apparent as the description thereof proceeds when considered in connection with the accompanying illustrative drawings.